less. Voltaire
finds that Julian had all the qualities of Trajan without his defects;
all the virtues of Cato without his ill-humour; all that one admires
in Julius Caesar without his vices; he had the continency of Scipio,
and was in all ways equal to Marcus Aurelius, the first of men. Nay,
more. If he had only lived longer, he would have retarded the fall of
the Roman Empire, if he could not arrest it entirely. We here see the
length to which "polemical fury" could hurry a man of rare insight.
Julian had been a subject of contention for years between the hostile
factions. While one party made it a point of honour to prove that he
was a monster, warring consciously against the Most High, the other
was equally determined to prove that he was a paragon of all virtue,
by reason of his enmity to the Christian religion. The deep interest
attaching to the pagan reaction in the fourth century, and the social
and moral problems it suggests, were perceived by neither side, and it
is not difficult to see why they were not. The very word reaction, in
its modern sense, will hardly be found in the eighteenth century, and
the thing that it expresses was very imperfectly conceived. We, who
have been surrounded by reactions, real or supposed, in politics, in
religion, in philosophy, recognise an old acquaintance in the efforts
of the limited, intense Julian to stem the tide of progress as
represented in the Christian Church. It is a fine instance of the way
in which the ever-unfolding present is constantly lighting up the
past. Julian and his party were the Ultramontanes of their day in
matters of religion, and the Romantics in matters of literature. Those
radical innovators and reformers, the Christians, were marching from
conquest to conquest, over the old faith, making no concealment of
their revolutionary aims and intentions to wipe out the past as
speedily as possible. The conservatives of those times, after long
despising the reformers, passed easily to fearing them and hating them
as their success became threatening. "The attachment to paganism,"
says Neander, "lingered especially in many of the ancient and noble
families of Greece and Rome." Old families, or new rich ones who
wished to be thought old, would be sure to take up the cause of
ancestral wisdom as against modern innovation. Before Julian came to
the throne, a pagan reaction was imminent, as Neander points out.
Julian himself was a remarkable man, as men of his class